Still no case against Lord Aldington

12:00AM GMT 14 Dec 2000

SIR - It was sadly predictable that the death of Lord Aldington would be used by the tiny minority of usual suspects to revive their tortured conspiracy theory about the events surrounding the British Army's handing over of 70,000 Cossacks and anti-Communist Yugoslavs in Austria in 1945 (letters, Dec. 12).

Rarely can any historical episode have been so blown up out of proportion and context, and subjected to so much distortion and selective citation of evidence. It was this that accounted, inter alia, for the award of record damages of £1.5 million to Lord Aldington in the libel action of 1989, of which, as your admirable obituary (Dec. 8) pointed out, he never received a penny.

No one would deny that the complex events in Austria in May 1945 constituted an unhappy episode, one of countless similar tragedies unfolding all over central Europe at the end of the war. But any serious examination of that episode will show how ludicrously misrepresented has been the role played by Lord Aldington, as was earlier that of Harold Macmillan.

There is a mountain of documentary evidence that Lord Aldington's detractors have had to ignore to sustain their warped view of these events. This includes the fact that, five days after he left Austria, the handovers were given full authorisation by the Eighth Army's commander, General Richard McCreery.

Ultimately, the only interesting thing about the crackpot view of that episode, which emerged decades after the war, is what it reveals about those who have given it credence. Alas, they have been egged on by ignorant lightweights in the media who find conspiracy theories more entertaining than facts. It was the striking way in which people's views of this controversy reflect their own moral and intellectual limitations that led me to call my 1997 book on it A Looking-Glass Tragedy.